- Media Studies, Digital Humanities, Feminism and Technology, Digital Rhetorics, Critical Theory, Digital Media & Learning, and 19 moreE-Government, Informatics, Rhetoric and Public Culture, Technology, Rhetoric, Citizen Journalism, Queer Youth, Military Simulations and Training, Human Rights, New Media, Social Network Analysis, e-research, Link analysis, Social Network Sites, Twitter, Facebook, Political Communication, Languages and Linguistics, Political Science, Visual Effects, Digital Arts, Modeling, 3D animation, Videography and Photography, Graphics Design, and Human Computer Interactionedit
- I write about institutions as digital media-makers and discuss the tensions between regulation and content-creation that must be negotiated by government agencies and universities.edit
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Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, Power Point slides, podcasts, and plagiarism detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smart phones,... more
Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, Power Point slides, podcasts, and plagiarism detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smart phones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seemed poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on learning itself. In this book, Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to “reform” higher education by applying technological solutions to problems in teaching and learning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process. Highly touted schemes--video games for the classroom, for example, or the distribution of iPads--let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectual development.
Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to “the Baked Professor”), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers--and for anyone who cares about education and technology.
Elizabeth Losh directs the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press) and the coauthor of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing.
Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to “the Baked Professor”), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers--and for anyone who cares about education and technology.
Elizabeth Losh directs the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press) and the coauthor of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing.
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"Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns... more
"Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government—even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and videos. In Virtualpolitik, Elizabeth Losh closely examines the government's digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator. Looking beyond the usual focus on interfaces, operations, and procedures, Losh analyzes the ideologies revealed in government's digital discourse, its anxieties about new online practices, and what happens when officially sanctioned material is parodied, remixed, or recontextualized by users.
Losh reports on a video game that panicked the House Intelligence Committee, pedagogic and therapeutic digital products aimed at American soldiers, government Web sites in the weeks and months following 9/11, PowerPoint presentations by government officials and gadflies, e-mail as a channel for whistleblowing, digital satire of surveillance practices, national digital libraries, and computer-based training for health professionals.
Losh concludes that the government's virtualpolitik—its digital realpolitik aimed at preserving its own power—is focused on regulation, casting as criminal such common online activities as file sharing, videogame play, and social networking. This policy approach, she warns, indefinitely postpones building effective institutions for electronic governance, ignores constituents' need to shape electronic identities to suit their personal politics, and misses an opportunity to learn how citizens can have meaningful interaction with the virtual manifestations of the state."
Losh reports on a video game that panicked the House Intelligence Committee, pedagogic and therapeutic digital products aimed at American soldiers, government Web sites in the weeks and months following 9/11, PowerPoint presentations by government officials and gadflies, e-mail as a channel for whistleblowing, digital satire of surveillance practices, national digital libraries, and computer-based training for health professionals.
Losh concludes that the government's virtualpolitik—its digital realpolitik aimed at preserving its own power—is focused on regulation, casting as criminal such common online activities as file sharing, videogame play, and social networking. This policy approach, she warns, indefinitely postpones building effective institutions for electronic governance, ignores constituents' need to shape electronic identities to suit their personal politics, and misses an opportunity to learn how citizens can have meaningful interaction with the virtual manifestations of the state."
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In “Hacking the Classroom: Eight Perspectives” (2014) published in Computers and Composition Online, eight authors discuss the question: “Why does the Higher Ed classroom need to be “hacked,” and how might we hack it?” Kristine Blair,... more
In “Hacking the Classroom: Eight Perspectives” (2014) published in Computers and Composition Online, eight authors discuss the question: “Why does the Higher Ed classroom need to be “hacked,” and how might we hack it?” Kristine Blair, editor of Computers and Composition Online describes the article thusly: “Evolving from a panel at the 2012 Computers and Writing Conference, contributors define hacking as a empowering, subversive process of “turning the critical gaze inward, rethinking institutional structures and practices and revising them to foster new social relationships, pedagogies and modes of inquiry.”
Research Interests: Multiculturalism, Digital Humanities, Film Studies, Critical Theory of Technology, Disability Studies, and 15 moreAccessibility, Digital Media, Visual Culture, Critical Pedagogy, Multimedia, Computers and Composition, Academic Writing, Pedagogy, Multimedia Learning, Multimodal Composition, New Media Studies, Social Sciences and Humanities, University, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Arts and Humanities
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Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing
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This essay examines how remixes that combine human rights footage with popular songs complicate our understanding of the relationship between media production and civic participation. We argue that editing and compositing complicates... more
This essay examines how remixes that combine human rights footage with popular songs complicate our understanding of the relationship between media production and civic participation. We argue that editing and compositing complicates establishing the authenticity of source material and that rapid dissemination of digital files through distributed networks may compromise the agency of victims. Furthermore, we raise questions about how so-called “conflict porn” that depicts graphic violence is received by Internet audiences. We offer a number of basic ethical principles for remixers of citizen journalism to consider in the post-Arab Spring milieu.
Research Interests: Information Systems, Sociology, Computer Science, Ethics, Philosophy of Agency, and 15 moreJournalism, Human Rights, Digital Media, Visual Rhetoric, Digital Journalism, Citizen Journalism, Video remix, Documentary Film, The Internet, Library and Information Studies, Remix Culture, Compromise, Film and Digital Media, Communication and media Studies, and Internet privacy
In the summer of 1997, a government agency first dramatized the potential of a " merger of television and the Internet, " 1 as the Mars rover experiment was sending the initial images shot by a robotic vehicle from the red planet's... more
In the summer of 1997, a government agency first dramatized the potential of a " merger of television and the Internet, " 1 as the Mars rover experiment was sending the initial images shot by a robotic vehicle from the red planet's surface back to Earth. Unlike previous space missions that had been watched on television sets in people's living rooms, this was a spectacle that took place on a computer screen, often in a school or workplace, where connectivity was still far superior to that available in most homes at the time. For purposes of scale, it's worth noting that on just one day during the rover's planned month-long mission, July 8, the space agency's website (at mpfwww.jpl.nasa .gov) received 47 million hits. By the time the month was over, web traffic statistics showed a total of 577 million visits to the main rover site alone. 2 To adjust to the large number of unexpected visitors, NASA soon set up mirror sites in over a dozen countries to handle the overflow from these virtual crowds. Corporate partners also stepped in to enlarge the rover project's web capacity. 3 This widely publicized event and accounts of periodic " traffic jams " on NASA's websites by space enthusiasts of all ages, who were jockeying to see pictures from the Sojourner rover simultaneously, soon spurred telecommunications companies to explore collaborative ventures with software makers in order to one day " offer individualized interactive digital television " with a wide range of content. 4 In the decade that followed, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would use its website for one public relations success after another and deploy advanced data visualization techniques to make a compelling case for its popular rover missions with high-resolution digital color photographs and 3-D computer animated films. Unlike other federally funded organizations that often struggled to find success as digital media-makers, JPL showed itself to be a consistent master of public rhetoric in these new media. While JPL's parent agency, NASA, had a number of high-profile failures involving computational media, which included revelations that regrettable PowerPoint 5 or e-mail 6 trails of miscommunication had contributed to two space shuttle crashes, JPL was busy promoting a positive vision of new information age ventures, which included Losh_11_Ch10.indd 311 10/6/2008 3:07:34 PM
ABSTRACT As has been apparent for the past several months, MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courseware) have emerged as a powerful contender for the next new education technology. Yet the landscape of education technology is littered with the... more
ABSTRACT As has been apparent for the past several months, MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courseware) have emerged as a powerful contender for the next new education technology. Yet the landscape of education technology is littered with the remains of previous technological breakthroughs that have failed to live up to their initial promise, or at least their initial rhetoric. This panel will present a lively debate about the promise, and realities, of MOOCs and whether they are transformative, or merely a faddish trend.
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Cynthia Haynes is Director of First-Year Composition and Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. Her research interests are rhetoric, composition, electronic pedagogy, virtual systems theory, feminist theory, critical... more
Cynthia Haynes is Director of First-Year Composition and Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. Her research interests are rhetoric, composition, electronic pedagogy, virtual systems theory, feminist theory, critical theory, computer games studies, digital aesthetics, and the rhetoric of war and terrorism. She is co-chair of the RCID PhD Colloquium on Serious Games at Clemson. One of her main projects has been designing and teaching rhetoric and writing in synchronous multimedia learning environments ( ...
The Interactive Media Laboratory at Dartmouth Medical School produces computer games and multimedia programs for public health preparedness. With Department of Homeland Security funding, the IML is developing the Virtual Terrorism... more
The Interactive Media Laboratory at Dartmouth Medical School produces computer games and multimedia programs for public health preparedness. With Department of Homeland Security funding, the IML is developing the Virtual Terrorism Response Academy, which uses game technology to prepare first responders for rescue efforts in which hazardous materials may be involved. This paper looks at the history of the "Virtual
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The Interactive Media Laboratory at Dartmouth Medical School produces computer games and multimedia programs for public health preparedness. With Department of Homeland Security funding, the IML is developing the Virtual Terrorism... more
The Interactive Media Laboratory at Dartmouth Medical School produces computer games and multimedia programs for public health preparedness. With Department of Homeland Security funding, the IML is developing the Virtual Terrorism Response Academy, which ...
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Just as the physical building in which a national library is housed can serve as a tangible expression of political and cultural philosophy, the architecture of a given digital archive represents and manifests particular ideological... more
Just as the physical building in which a national library is housed can serve as a tangible expression of political and cultural philosophy, the architecture of a given digital archive represents and manifests particular ideological features in keeping with the specific national legacy that ...
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This essay presents the results of a study of first-year students in a California University who report competence as speakers and writers of a language other than English. The data collected for the study include a language questionnaire... more
This essay presents the results of a study of first-year students in a California University who report competence as speakers and writers of a language other than English. The data collected for the study include a language questionnaire administered to over a thousand students and, from a smaller sample, responses to focus group interviews, a research paper written at the culmination of a year-long writing-intensive humanities course, and reflections on that paper drawn from a writer's memo. To establish a theoretical context, the authors review the founding assumptions of contrastive rhetoric as well as recent critiques of CR, arriving at a framework for analysis based in transnational cultural theory. Drawing from the data, they sketch profiles of students with home languages of Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, and Spanish, finding that the students’ transnational linguistic experiences and identifications inform in complex and significant ways their research and writing strategies, as well as their future educational goals.